Society

Sunday

David Butterfield

Two athletes who took on the fells – and won

In a summer where sport as we know it has been cruelly cancelled, opportunities to celebrate athletic heroism are hard to seek. But today, not one but two titanic achievements occurred independently – and only a few miles from each other. Both have a strong chance of being the country’s most impressive running feats of the coming decade, if boasting weren’t anathema to them. The 24-Hour Fell Record is what it sounds like: you have precisely one day of continuous running to cover as many of the Cumbrian mountains as possible, so long as you get back to the spot from where you started. When the early Victorian tourists first

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Will Cambridge stand up for free speech in China?

Last month, Dr Priyamvada Gopal, of Churchill College, Cambridge University, tweeted ‘White Lives Don’t Matter’. She was abused online and received threats of violence. Cambridge issued a statement: ‘The university defends the right of its academics to express their own lawful opinions, which others might find controversial… [It] deplores in the strongest terms abuse and personal attacks.’ Dr Gopal was promptly promoted to a professorship. Perhaps professorial chairs should not be handed out as prizes because the person promoted has expressed apparently racist sentiments, but the university was surely correct to defend Dr Gopal’s free-speech rights. So it should protest when the universities with which it associates infringe those rights

Saturday

Friday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The Spectator is growing – and hiring

The Spectator is recruiting, which doesn’t happen often. Our sales have grown in a way that we did not expect during the Covid crisis which is why we are returning our furlough money to the government. Our growth has continued: a quarter of our current subscribers signed up in the past three months. Most have opted for the print magazine but the new subscribers also visit our website on a daily basis; most take our daily emails. They’re after agenda-setting analysis that you simply would not find elsewhere, comment from the best writers in the country, the most informative bulletins and thought-provoking podcasts.  We’re looking for a reporter, in the spirit of our political mischief internship (which Katy

Dr Waqar Rashid Dr Waqar Rashid

What’s the true cost of lockdown?

Mental health has always been the pauper when it came to medical provision and its sufferers long stigmatised. Some well-meaning campaigns have been undertaken in recent years to break taboos and stereotypes and help alleviate the suffering of those with mental health conditions. But the fallout from coronavirus and the climate of fear which continues to trouble so many people has almost certainly undone much of this work. Many people are – whether they are at a high risk of falling seriously ill from coronavirus or not – still terrified. People are afraid of venturing back into the outside world. Those who do keep their distance from others. Masks are

Joanna Williams

Could the Domestic Abuse Bill backfire against women?

The Domestic Abuse Bill, championed by Theresa May, could easily have fallen foul of Brexit, Boris Johnson, the suspension of Parliament, a new government or coronavirus. But the Bill has beat the odds: it was passed by the House of Commons this week and is currently making its way to the Lords. It’s pure coincidence that this Bill should be in the news at the very point the nation is emerging from lockdown and, collectively, beginning to take stock of the damage wreaked, not just by Covid-19, but the confining of people to their homes. One sadly predictable result of lockdown is that rates of domestic abuse are likely to

Carl Heneghan

Studying sewage could help solve a coronavirus mystery

There are plenty of mysteries about how coronavirus spread around the world so quickly. But could we shed some light on this by looking in an unusual place? Several studies have been doing just that: tracing the emergence of covid-19 by investigating frozen faeces samples from sewage. This analysis cannot tell us where the virus originated from, nor can it tell us whether the recovered micro-organisms are still infectious. But they can give us ideas about how long we have been living alongside a virus which has so far killed more than half-a-million people. Coronavirus has been found in sewage from several countries predating the detection of the first confirmed cases

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Racial sensitivity training turned me into a confused racist

The Black Lives Matter movement has put racial sensitivity at the top of the agenda. A new atmosphere of moral rectitude has taken hold, and anyone who makes a tactless or unwelcome statement about race is likely to be fired. That’s what happened to Jack Hepple after a ‘White Lives Matter’ stunt over Man City’s football ground last month. He lost his job. His girlfriend, Megan Rambadt, a reflexologist, was also let go after her employer had earlier suggested it was willing to keep her on if she undertook racial sensitivity training. Meanwhile Keir Starmer has suggested that Labour party workers will be made to follow his example and complete

Thursday

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

Magic money: what can possibly go wrong?

39 min listen

We’ve been told for years that the magic money tree doesn’t exist – but has the Chancellor just found it? (00:55) Now that Hong Kong has come into closer orbit with Beijing, is Taiwan next? (21:15) And finally, we find out a little about the weird and wonderful world of hotel carpets – see them here! (32:35) With The Spectator’s Economics Correspondent Kate Andrews; Miatta Fahnbulleh from the New Economics Foundation; security expert Alessio Patalano; Taiwan expert Shelley Rigger; pilot and carpet connoisseur Bill Young; and journalist Sophie Haigney. Presented by Cindy Yu.

Karen Glaser

Karen jokes aren’t funny any more

What’s in a name? Answer: if it’s Karen, quite a lot. Over the past week my moniker has come to denote a middle-aged, uneducated woman who is unaware of her white privilege and cares little about tackling racial inequality. So on behalf of other Karens, it’s time to say: the joke has gone too far. When Karen first became the butt of online gags a few years ago, she wanted to speak to your manager, right now. The brash mother of three typically sported an unfashionable bob. Friends sent me endless memes about her and I would smile. I’m a middle-aged mother with strong opinions and what can fairly be

The Spectator

Covid-19 update: most of the UK is almost corona free

Britain is now doing more Covid-19 testing than anywhere else in Europe, offering a detailed regional picture that shows how rapidly the virus has receded in most of the country. The latest figures were released earlier this afternoon, for 29 June to 5 July, using the German definition: how many weekly positive infections per 100,000 people? The German danger zone is 50. Of 150 upper-tier local authorities in England, only one is over that limit: locked-down Leicester. And even now it’s unclear if this is due to more testing or more virus. Some 73 per cent of local authorities now have a score of 5 weekly infections or less per

Daniel French

Welby’s bid to placate statue topplers could backfire

I’m a Church of England vicar and I’m worried about the Archbishop of Canterbury’s planned review of statues and monuments. The church, we have been told, hopes to ‘play a leading role’ in facilitating ‘meaningful dialogue’ and apply ‘justice’ with ‘real outcomes’ in assessing statues. But what does this mean for churches like mine? Anglicanism prides itself on being a highbrow form of Christianity. It operates in subtleties and niceties. In Anglican-speak, the expectation is that a ‘review’ is a modest bureaucratic exercise where a few monuments are quietly mothballed into vestries and some ethnically diverse depictions of Christ commissioned. If so, there is little to worry about. But will

Edward Chancellor

Why Clive should not fall

The movement to pull down statues of Robert Clive has attracted some influential voices. In his Spectator Diary, Tristram Hunt says he’s been approached by my old friend the historian William Dalrymple to see whether the V&A museum would take the Whitehall statue of Clive. Fresh from his Brexit battles, Lord Adonis has joined the fray. But Hunt doesn’t want anything to do with the ‘corrupt and colonising’ Clive. Many of Clive’s contemporaries would have felt the same way. The trouble is their views were formed by ‘fake news’ which, like its 21st century counterpart, was contrived for partisan political purposes and was uncritically accepted by persons who should have

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Sunak’s statement, shop closures and a hoo-ha over Boohoo

Home Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, announced measures intended to stimulate the economy. Under a £111 million scheme, companies in England would be given £1,000 for each new work experience place they offered. Under a £2 billion scheme, householders would be given two-thirds of the cost of energy-saving work such as insulation, up to £5,000. The government made available £1.57 billion in emergency support for the arts and heritage sites; it was to go to institutions, not freelance performers. Among business failures and job losses, sandwich chain Pret A Manger was to close 30 of its 410 shops and lose 1,000 staff. Up to 5,000 jobs were to

John Rutter

SOS: Save our singers

‘Musician’ is how I described myself to the nice Latvian lady interviewing me the other week for an ONS survey connected with the coronavirus, but that didn’t tell the government much. In economic terms, our profession embraces everyone from Sir Paul McCartney to the struggling garage band that may or may not be allowed back into your newly reopened pub. In terms of what we do, we divide into three overlapping categories — writers, administrators and performers, and our experience of pandemic and lockdown has been sharply different. I’m mainly a writer, and I guiltily admit that I have welcomed my first chance for years to work with minimal interruption

The Spectator

Letters: Why Hugh Dowding deserves a statue

Police relations Sir: As a former Met Police officer, with a similar background to Kevin Hurley, I was surprised how much I disagreed with his article (‘Cop out’, 27 June). Central to this was the lack of emphasis he placed on the attitude of police officers. The emphasis on violent gang crime undoubtedly leads to a distortion in how young black men are perceived by the police, and this in turn can quickly lead to confrontation on the street. The attitude of young police officers is key to avoiding an escalating reaction between them and members of the public. Senior officers need to develop more holistic ways of addressing crime,

Taki

The forgotten victims of communism

I just read a piece by Scott McConnell in the American Conservative, a magazine we co-founded 18 years ago. He writes about how the victims of communism are less commemorated than those of fascism. The death toll under communism was 100 million (see the Black Book of Communism). And as the mass murders continued, your Cambridge Joseph Needhams and his fellow apologists insisted that Maoism represented mankind’s best hope. Maoism never received the moral obloquy that Nazism did. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which documents the horrific enormity of the Nazi project, has had 40 million visitors since 1993; the victims of communism are marked by a ten-foot statue

Melissa Kite

Will Zooming replace real-life socialising?

‘Are you seriously telling me you would rather meet up on Zoom than in reality?’ I asked a friend as we got stuck into an argument about the future of our existence. ‘Well, it’s all we’ve got,’ he argued. No, it really isn’t. But how to explain to people who refuse to stop being locked down that lockdown is, to all intents and purposes, over? I get the distinct impression that a lot of people have so thoroughly enjoyed sitting on their backsides doing nothing — sorry, I mean finding themselves and getting in touch with their inner child and being close to nature — that they don’t want it

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 11 July 2020

What goes through a world-class player’s mind when he or she stops to think for an age during a hand? I always find it slightly humbling: are they calculating probabilities, spotting chances, and creating contingency plans that mere mortals would find hard to grasp? Almost certainly that’s true, but they’re also doing something else: sizing up their opponents. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve presented a declarer-problem to a top player, only to be asked: ‘Who am I playing against?’ Take this hand. When I asked David Gold how he would tackle the diamond suit, his immediate response was: ‘How good is my left-hand opponent? How good is my

Luke McShane

The Streisand effect

There is no sight so compelling as one that would be hidden. I am fascinated by the Streisand effect, named after Barbra Streisand, whose Malibu house appears in a large online collection of aerial photographs documenting the California coastline. In 2003, she filed a lawsuit to have it removed, which as well as being unsuccessful drew much more publicity to the photo. You can count on that appetite for mischief: Goya’s ‘Portrait of the Duke of Wellington’ was more in the public eye after it was stolen from the National Gallery in 1961 than before. (Wittily, the painting ‘appeared’ the following year in the hideout of Bond villain Dr No;